The Surname of Swartzentrover

Swartzentrover - Swartzentruber - Swiss - German

Variant of Swiss German Schwarzentruber, Schwartzentrauber, an
occupational name for a grower of black wine grapes, from Middle
High German swarz ‘black’ + trube ‘grape’, or from the name of a
house or tavern with a sign a dark grapes.*

A Mennonite family name, Swartzendruber is Swiss in origin and
may mean "seller of black grapes." In the early 1700s a family Bible
used the spelling Schwarzentraub. This is one of the earliest known
occurrences of the name. The Schwartzendrubers originally belonged
to the Amish branch of the Mennonites. Among the Swiss Brethren
leaving Switzerland for the Netherlands in 1711 there was a Hans
Schwartzentrub, of Trub(?), who, however, left the ship at Mannheim.
A Christian Schwartztrauben is mentioned in the Dutch Naamlijst
of 1767-1802 as a preacher at the Weissemheim am Berg
congregation (Amish) in the duchy of Leiningen, Germany. Bäntz
Schwarztrauben was a preacher of the Amish church of Waldeck
starting in 1775.

According to a family tradition the first American
Swartzendrubers were immigrants from Waldeck*. The first-known
immigrations occurred soon after 1800, when settlements were made in
Ontario and Pennsylvania near Somerset and Berlin. Soon, however,
migrations to points farther west resulted in comparatively few
residents remaining in Pennsylvania. The name has been most
prominent in Ontario, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio, Indiana and Iowa.
Prominent Mennonite personalities who bore this name include Jacob
J. Schwartzendruber of Waldeck (Germany), Pennsylvania, and Iowa;
Jacob Frederick and Joseph Schwartzendruber of Iowa; and Solomon
Swartzendruber of Michigan.

Partly taken from:Dictionary of American Family Names,Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4